I think, on the whole, the psychological abuse is worse than the physical in some ways. The bruises and breaks heal, the scars (usually) fade, but the emotional issues keep on lingering. Having spent the past 29 years dealing with the ramifications of first an abusive childhood and later making the same mistakes in my first longterm relationship, it certainly seems that way anyhow. I also agree that you can't have the physical/sexual without the psychological, but the psychological alone can be just as harmful. After all, you don't need to be beaten or raped to find yourself suicidal because you feel so damn useless and worthless as a result of the abuse. It's definitely insidious, slow to start, difficult to recognise and hard to leave. The comment above, about not realising how wrong things are, struck a chord for me... In my case, though the abuse started when I was a toddler and continued for many years, I didn't realise that other families weren't like mine until I was 8, and even then the question I asked was "What's wrong with me?" rather than "What's wrong with the abuser?".